Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Coming Soon - Paranormal Activity 2: We Want Your Money!

According to this post on The Hollywood Reporter, brought up on Ain't It Cool News, Paramount is seriously considering a sequel to Paranormal Activity.

Even though this shouldn't be a huge surprise, it still sucks. It's like believing your spouse is slutting around on you then suddenly having proof of said slut-age. You just feel worse for having it confirmed.

This sheer naked greed is what brought about the collapse of the U.S. economy, people. The article states that Paramount parent corp CEO Philippe Dauman said, "the movie has been one of those surprise hits that comes along only rarely," admits that a sequel wouldn't have the same element of surprise as the original.

"Our team will come up with the right creative and marketing approach to make sure that we benefit from a sequel," Dauman said.

Two words, Mr. Dauman. Bull. Shit.

First of all Paranormal Activity was not the product of the Hollywood sytem and its studio-think. It was one individual in charge: its writer/director. When it was presented to Hollywood after receiving great responses at film festivals, Hollywood's first reaction was to buy it to remake it. How typical. (In a parallel universe that was exactly what was done and that film was slickly remade for $25 million, directed by some young dude who made commercials and music videos, starred some hard bodies from hot shows on The CW and Fox, and made a grand total of $7.2 million on over 2,500 screens. It was beat out by a Jim Belushi movie, Wild Hogs 3: Hog Wild. The parallel universe marketing team, when called to the carpet on the failure of the movie stated, "we did the same flashy, strobe-y, editing by Cuisinart campaign we always do for these stupid horror movies." (On Earth Prime here, the original movie was released to theaters and has grossed to-date more that $85 million.))

From what I've read it seems the studio suits had to be hit over the fucking head SEVERAL TIMES to see the worth in this movie. I have to imagine that most of the people involved HAD NEVER EVEN SEEN THE MOVIE. After viewing one online trailer early last year for Paranormal Activity I was immediately hooked on this (and so were a ton of other people). "WHEN IS THIS COMING OUT" I wondered? Here's the problem with the studios: too many memos and lunches and yackity yack. Watch the damn movies. If you're thinking of remaking something into a big budget movie, or spending millions of dollars on advertising you need to watch the films first. The powers that be obviously don't trust the word of their many layers of underlings if they have to be told over and over and over that something they watched is really good.

So get ready for Paranormal Activity 2. Or PA2 as the marketing peeps will no doubt push it. That's the scariest thing I've heard in a long while.

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